Won't boot from CD - Tried many things. Help?

So I spent some time searching these forums - And followed all the wonderful advice that was given to others to fix their problems, but nothing quite seems to work. This laptop's hardrive died a while back, and has since been removed. I am attempting a boot from the CD so I can set this up for my girlfriend to use a browsing machine/webmail checking machine.

Here are my specs:

Compaq Presario 2100US

Processor Intel Pentium 4-M 2.4 GHz
Data Bus Speed 400.0 MHz
Cache Memory
Type L2 cache - Advanced Transfer Cache
Installed Size 256.0 KB
RAM
Installed Size 512.0 MB / 1024.0 MB (max)
Technology DDR SDRAM - 266.0 MHz
Memory Specification Compliance DDR266/PC2100
Flash Memory
Hard Drive 60.0 GB
Storage Removable None - None
Hard drive type Portable

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It started with a blank screen after the area where you can enter 'cheat codes'. It would just go black and hang there. So I tried all of these commands, to no avail:

nofastb
vga=0
noapic
noagp
noapm
nodma
nomce
nofirewire
nopcmcia
noscsi
noswap
nousb
nosmp
noaudio
acpi=off pnpbios=off noapic noapm


Trying the different video mode - I just get a blinking cursor. All the others had no effect.
I also tried :boot: knoppix vga=0 debug -b 3, and it stopped at this line:

0.465210] Simple boot flag at 0x36 set to 0x1.


....HELP!

You can try : Knoppix 2, and see if you can boot to a command prompt (shell). Also vga=normal.

Another thing to consider is the possibility of a bad cd burn. Can you try the cd in a different PC ?